Same Day Wheelchair

In 2019 I needed a wheelchair by Thursday morning. It was Wednesday, I had no time to go find one, and Thursday was going to be hard without it.

I opened Amazon, ordered one at 8:30 in the morning, and it was on my doorstep by 7:45 that night. Same day. A WHEELCHAIR. I remember sitting there a little stunned. The size and scale it takes to put any object at your door, let alone what I ordered, in hours felt like the edge of what was possible.

That was the wow. For a while, it was everyone’s wow. The marvel was that the distance between needing a thing and holding it had collapsed to an afternoon.

The wow moved. Seismically.

Now the thing arriving by dinner isn’t a tangible. It is a business. A campaign. A mountain of research. A working application. A plan you would have booked six weeks and three meetings to produce, sitting finished on your screen before you eat. The same collapse, pointed at the work itself instead of the delivery truck.

All this, yet nothing fundamental has changed.

We did not become different people. We are doing what we have always done, wanting something and closing the gap to it as fast as the tools allow. The wheelchair, the business, the plan: the same human instinct against a faster and faster clock. Every generation gets a new wow and mistakes it for a new world. It is the same world. We just keep compressing the time between the idea and the thing.

Lately there is a slowdown drumbeat, every month or two. Some of it is concern about doing this safely, and that concern is justifiable. Some of it is a way to slow whoever is catching up. Quietly, a strategy. I guess both can be true at once.

But the capability at the end of this is not waiting for our permission. It is coming. We will not feel ready, because nobody feels ready for the big ones. Ready is not a date that arrives. Slowing down mostly means waiting longer for something that was going to happen anyway.

The speed is not the story. It never was. The story is what the speed puts within reach, and some of it we have wanted for a very long time. But picture the Wednesday you need a wheelchair by Thursday morning. In that moment, you are not cheering for anyone to tap the brakes.

The wow will move again. It always does. What stays is the person on the other end of it, the one who needed the thing to arrive.